


when it rains

by Cinnamonbookworm



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, MAJOR ORIGIN SPOILERS, Rain, TRUST ME DON'T READ THIS UNLESS YOU'VE WATCHED ORIGINS, Umbrellas, based on gorgeous art, clueless children being clueless in the rain, gabriel is hawkmoth, the whole team's here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 01:30:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6174901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamonbookworm/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years later, and the rain goes on for days.<br/>Or: origins devastated me and then i saw this <a href="http://volpinc.tumblr.com/post/140536058334/electric-firefly-x-artist-4%EC%8B%9C-permission">glorious fanart</a> and knew i had to write something<br/>MAJOR ORIGIN SPOILERS. TRUST ME, YOU WON'T WANT TO READ THIS UNTIL YOU'VE WATCHED ORIGINS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when it rains

**Author's Note:**

> who else cried a lot after that ending? no? just me?  
> that's a lie, i saw my dash. you all were just as much of a mess as i was. anyway, this is me, trying to deal with said mess

There’s no akuma this week.

No terrified children in the streets, no one screaming for help on the television, nothing but silence. Silence and the faint song playing on Marinette’s radio. Silence and the song on the radio and that pitter patter of rain outside her window.

They go on patrol anyways, treading along the rooftops of Paris with more delicacy than usual. Occasionally Chat slips on the water and lands in a puddle. They don’t talk a lot. There’s just a quiet silence of camaraderie.

They’re still trying to get back to where they were before all of this.

Hawkmoth’s gone now. He’s gone and everything’s eerily quiet. Chat’s jokes don’t feel like he has his heart in them. Ladybug’s reprimands don’t have her heart in them either. She knows he’s just trying to make her smile, even when he’s hurting. She can’t really feel it in her to tell him “not now” when there’s never been a time as good as now.

Now. When everything’s gone and quiet and it’s been raining for days. Now. When they both end up sitting on a roof that overlooks the Eiffel tower and she thinks back to when they were just starting out with this, so much younger than they are now, when they weren’t quite as concerned about university. Back when they were scaling the tower that sits in front of them just trying to fix Ivan and Mylene.

Chloe might’ve been there too.

Something stirs in the back of her mind, though. Something maybe important about that day. Something involving rain. She can’t quite remember.

“I like the rain,” she ends up saying, to no one in particular, but mostly to Chat because he’s the only one listening and it’s a topic a lot less volatile than any of the previous week’s explosive events.

“I like the rain,” she says, because she doesn’t want to tell him how, for a second there, she wanted to know who he was behind that mask, who he was and why he looked so hurt when they finally saw Hawkmoth face-to-face for the first time.

“Yeah…” he manages, with a bit of a sigh, “it makes Paris look really beautiful.”

She smiles for the first time all day. “It really does.”

“Days like this, makes me want my old umbrella back.”

“Did you lose it?”

“No.” Chat’s eyes dart to the ground, where two little kids, in red and yellow raincoats, run screaming and giggling through the puddles in front of their apartment building. “I gave it to someone a few years ago. Still haven’t gotten around to getting a new one.”

She can understand that. “Heroics do have a tendency to take up our time, don’t they, kitty?”

“Yeah… I can’t believe it’s been three years. Everything’s changed so much.”

“It really has.”

His eyes regain this sparkle she hasn’t seen in awhile; the one that happens when he gets a little teasing and his mouth curves up in a smirk and Marinette supposes it’s a good sign. A sign that he’s healing from whatever happened in that dark room with those swirling butterflies.

“What were you like three years ago?”

She pokes him, a reminder that they’re not _supposed_ to talk about their civilian selves. He raises an eyebrow. “You yourself just said things have changed so much. It’s not like your identity is in peril, my lady.”

She smiles, and she lets him win this one. There shouldn’t be any harm in it, after all; he’s right.

It’s almost hard to think back to who she was before she became Ladybug. Who she was before Alya. Before Chat. Before Adrien.

“I had the absolute _worst_ luck.”

“You? Really? I don’t believe it. What changed?”

Ladybug shoves Chat Noir’s shoulder a little bit since he doesn’t get it. He still doesn’t get it, after all these years. “I met _you_ , silly kitty.”

He stares open-mouthed at her for a second, then shakes himself out of it.

“What about you, huh?”

“I was lonely. Actually I think that girl I gave the umbrella to was one of my first friends.”

“That’s sweet.”

Something ticks in the back of her memory.. There’s this umbrella in the corner of her room and it’s black and she’s been using it for years now and she can’t quite remember the significance of it. It was important, though, she knows that. Something happened with it. Something involving rain (of course) and those steps in front of the school and… Adrien.

Adrien was there. With the black umbrella. And he gave it to her and their hands touched and she forgot the way words were supposed to sound when they came out of her mouth.

Marinette blinks quickly. Chat continues his story but she’s not really listening anymore. She tries to remember if she’s seen Adrien with an umbrella since then.

It’s been raining all week, surely he’s…

He was using a newspaper on Tuesday. And he held his jacket over his head on Monday. And last Friday… well last Friday it hadn’t started raining yet because last Friday was the day that they took Hawkmoth’s miraculous away from him. She can’t remember any umbrellas earlier than that, though.

It’s funny, she used to think she was an expert on all things Adrien Agreste and now she can’t even remember whether or not he’s used an umbrella since he gave her one.

There’s a few particularly vivid memories of Chloe stealing someone else’s umbrella to hold above Adrien’s head, however.

Chat’s miraculous beeps and he jumps off the roof, splashing in the puddle next to the kids. They smile and laugh and he sends a smile of his own back at her.

 

*.*.*

 

The rain’s still coming down hard. Adrien wonders if it’s Paris’ way of trying to cleanse itself after all these years of evil roaming its streets.

He’s still trying to wrap his brain around the idea of the cause of said evil being his father. He’s still trying to stop feeling like every single part of him is becoming disconnected when he thinks about it. He’s been spending a lot of time as Chat Noir since it happened. Chat Noir’s not the one disintegrating.

What he’d told Ladybug the other day was the truth; he hasn’t had a real good umbrella since he gave Marinette his when he’d first started school. He didn’t tell Nathalie he needed one and his father… well he’d never noticed. Probably been too busy akumatizing Adrien’s classmates to notice anyway.

That doesn’t change that it’s hard to walk in the rain alone without an umbrella as Adrien Agreste when Adrien Agreste is disintegrating into tiny pieces and the tiny droplets of water being pelted at him are not making that process go any slower.

He’d known his father missed his mother, _Adrien_ missed his mother, but never in a million years had he thought it would be worth terrorizing an entire city and using teenagers’ emotions as weapons to bring her back. If even _Chloe_ could move on from losing her mother and become Queen Bee, why couldn’t his father?

It’s really hard to walk in the rain alone without an umbrella.

Maybe he should get one. It would be easy. There’s a corner store just a few blocks away. He’d have to go past that park he used to play at as a child with Chloe and his mother and his…

Before he knows it he’s crying again.

Adrien hasn’t let anyone see him like this. Even Chloe, the one who was there, the one who understood, the one who _knows_. Even Ladybug. Ladybug’s been so strong through all of this and she wouldn’t understand because her understanding would mean she’d have to know who he was and she’d been so adamant that they shouldn’t tell each other and he doesn’t want to do anything she doesn’t want. Not even for the sake of his feelings.

He hopes anyone who sees him will mistake the tears for rain. It’s certainly raining hard enough for that.

When it gets past the point that he can actually _see_ in front of him, he ducks into an alley a block away from the Dupain-Cheng bakery. He buries his head in his arms and tries to shelter himself from the rain in the shadow of a dumpster. Even though he has a friend whose house is beyond close, he can’t imagine explaining the way this feels to anyone.

And then it happens. Something magical.

In something out of a Disney movie, Ladybug descends from the sky, something black in her hands that almost looks like the staff he uses as Chat Noir.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and Adrien looks up, hardly believing his eyes. His meetings with Ladybug when he’s his civilian self have been rare, scattered throughout the years and almost always without words.

She’s asked him simple questions, _are you okay?_ being one of them, more times than he can count. This time, though, it’s not in the middle of an akuma attack and he hasn’t just dodged a flying car or been surrounded by penguins or been dangled off a building.

This time, his only problem is the internal one that he hasn’t told anyone about, not even her.

She takes the black thing in her hands and presses a button and it becomes an umbrella. Something ticks at the back of his memory.

“You look like you could use this,” she says. And she holds it out to him.

There’s a lot of ways this scene could look to someone if anyone else was in the alley with them. Ladybug protecting a civilian being the main one. Ladybug doing what she does. Ladybug being a hero with a kind heart. Ladybug being who he fell in love with on that day that…

It’s _his_ umbrella - the one he’d given Marinette. The one he’d just told Ladybug about the other day. The one-

“Marinette?”

She doesn’t answer. He might be able to see a blush if she wasn’t wearing her mask.

She answers like Ladybug. “Yesterday you said you needed an umbrella.”

“ _Marinette._ ”

Suddenly Adrien feels like he’s standing outside the school in the rain again, wondering what he can say to get this beautiful, _brilliant_ girl to not hate him for the misunderstanding that’s been going on since they met. This time, however, she’s the one holding the umbrella.

“ _Je t’aime.”_

When he says it he’s still sitting down, looking up in wonder. It comes out so easy after being held back for so many years. He wonders whether Volpina’s known the whole time, if that was what that joke last month about “ _I thought cats weren’t supposed to be this blind_ ” was.

Ladybug smiles at him and it’s almost like the sun comes out. Almost.

He was so worried she didn’t feel the same way, but the way she’s looking at him - with all the love in the world, all the love that he’s never felt before - it’s almost enough to make him smile too.

“Je t’aime, Chat Noir.” She says, and he stands up, taking a step closer to her.

For the first time in three years, Adrien Agreste holds onto his black umbrella. And he kisses the girl he first gave it to.


End file.
